skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have never had my merchant account frozen for any period of time. There was once an issue when I first opened it. They called me, I told them what transactions had occured and why. They accepted it and continued on. In no time during that process did they stop payments or funds from being received. It's a big difference. They check with the business owner before they do something, not after like PayPal.
HFT is not "automation" in the traditional sense. Stock markets exist to raise funding for projects (exits using ipo, new projects in public companies). Those occur on the day+ scale, not milliseconds. There's no point to increasing the speed of it (other than just for the sake of increasing the speed). It's like increasing the speed of the channel switching on your tv - after a certain point it's better to devote engineering resources on other aspects of the tv.
Misleading headline; trades are not the same as quotes.
Playing devil's advocate for a minute here...

Does it really matter why they do it? Almost any teen would have an element of hedonism in their choice to take a gap year. In fact, I'd hope that was the case!

But does that matter? It still gets them out of their bubble. Sure, sure, they'll be in a different bubble with the Dragons stuff, but a lot of people need that safety net. But they're still out of whatever their environment was and they see a different one. It's hard for me to see that as a bad thing.
and on favourable terms to you

Not so much when they front-run you...LOL
It has no effect on Alice and Bob if they don't sell. It is favourable to them if they buy.

The stock price is just the opinion of 0.2% of people at any one time - and hence means essentially nothing to an investor. Does the spot price opinion/first impression of a person matter - or does the long term attributes of their character matter? Just because there are more opinions - being given at a faster rate - doesn't mean that a) they're right or b) they should be acted upon as fact and c) that they shouldn't be exploited for those of a more stable nature.

For example: I bought a huge amount of TSLA stock when it fell 12% in one day a week or so ago for no particular reason. I subsequently realised a 6% gain. I'm happy - thank you HFTs and short term traders - your vol makes my alpha.
I think I threw up in my mouth a little.
Ask HN: What Should A Senior In High School Do?
I am currently a senior in high school and I love working on my Android application during my free time: http://bit.ly/ComedyZone

As a junior I took AP Computer Science in Java and I loved it.

I am lost on what the best route is to become a successful programmer/mobile developer.

Should I get a degree in Computer Science?

Should I teach myself/create more applications?

What would you suggest I do?
No, a 2D layout (vs a linear layout) isn't new or incorrect. It has been around forever and is best-suited for a non-hierarchical browsing of items. The lack of hierarchy is a feature, not a bug.
I'm not sure if "has used git" should be log(n)-- I'm only barely a programmer, and I've never used CVS/SVN, but I use git to version control markdown files.
Stop Looking For The ‘Perfect’ Tools
At first glance it seems to explain why health care and education are relatively more expensive, because of the cost issue, but that only explains half of supply and demand. To the consumer (demand side), it matters not what the cost was to the supplier. It would be almost invisible to them. If this was truly a cost issue, then we should see demand lower as prices rise. Yet there are more medical treatments and people in college than ever before.

The other half of the reason is that education and health care are close to a perfectly elastic good. People will pay almost any price for it, so there was little incentive for the supply side to reduce costs. Instead of was easier to find ways to raise prices. The article's referenced examples of technology being used to reduce costs shows that it was possible all along.
During a liquidity crisis - aka any crisis - buyers don't get front run - sellers do. There is a reason for this - front running only occurs when you want something (liquidity) without having to pay for it first.

For example: You want to off load a metric ton of stock in a company - you tell your broker - he puts out a VWAP sell call to an algorithm - HFTs realise - they short sell to anticipate your liquidity premium (aka you want to sell NOW and you are willing to pay for it).

If you didn't want to get out so bad - you cannot be front run - because you wouldn't demand a liquidity premium.
Show HN: App_Offline Page Generator
The site allows you to create a custom App_Offline.htm page when you need it. App_Offline is a page that you can use to take your site offline when deploying updates or performing maintenance. Use App_Offline.htm to show a friendly message to your users instead of an ugly error
I found that "don't launch when somebody famous is in ill health" -- as well as the lesson about simply copying Apple's launch dates/times -- could best be summed up by something a bit broader. Namely, do your market research before your launch.

Market research means knowing your customers, as inside and out as you possibly can. And, if HN users represent a significant chunk of who you expect to be your early adopters, then you should make it your business to keep abreast of everything happening in the HN world. The world of stories of potential interest to HN is direct competition to your launch announcement. If you want to be newsworthy, know what news you're going up against -- especially as relates to your specific audience.

(In fairness, I don't think anyone in their shoes could have predicted Steve Jobs's death, down to the day and time. But even still, there could have been a hundred other big-attention topics that would have buried them, had they not been paying attention. Such as another major product launch, or what have you -- things that would have been slightly more predictable.)
Avoid fast food and chains. Shop carefully. Vote for labeling laws.
Prostitutes attempt to skirt the law in the same way by accepting "donations" for time instead of payment for services. You know how well that works for them.
Maybe I want to read the news article describing it first, and then decide if I want to visit webplatform.org or not.
One of my favorite character arcs in all of literature is that of Spock's, from that stereotyped "rationality" through developing his own comfort with human emotions. Even as from the outside, it seems little has changed, the initial Spock and the final Spock are very different people. Kirk's journey is flashier and easier to find in the story, but far more trite and it's been done a hundred times. I don't know of very many parallels to the Spock arc. I grew up with Star Trek but I find I didn't really "get it" until much later in life. I wish the Original Series wasn't so painful to watch because of its superficial flaws, because while I would not presume to say it's the "best" Star Trek, it probably is the most legitimately "literary" at its best.
Op-ed: Let’s get rid of compulsory school days
Yeah because retail investors should do more with their money - not.

There's a reason these industries are hard and should be hard - these are serious industries with serious consequences. Health care - screw it up and you kill someone. Drones - screw it up and you kill someone. Cars - screw it up and you kill someone. Finance - screw it up and you lose the retirement savings of your investors.

These are not games to be played by unsophisticated people or green entrepreneurs. This does not mean that the extant incumbents are any good - it merely means that new players does not automatically confer innovation goodness (see natural monopolies/booms).
The SEC and individual exchanges have access to the full non-anonymized feed. Other market participants, such as nanex, only get the anonymized feed.
you could do a game. i've seen people getting really addicted to those iOS logo ID games.

for the incentives, just use something like kiip.
Why worry about this? There is no scientific evidence that "genetic modification" (the new kind, rather than the kind of genetic modification that has always been done by breeding) poses any health risks whatsoever.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/antivaccine-ve...

A recent submission to HN based on very reliable statistics pointed out that life expectancy in the United States at birth, at age 40, at age 60, at age 65, and even at age 80 has been steadily RISING

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...

since 1960, so new foodstuffs introduced since then based on GMO science so far don't seem to have net harm for the population in balance with all other social and environmental changes since then.
"You are an adult. You will manage your own machine and tools." seems to be almost directly in opposition to "You will not dig ditches here, and we will not ask you to do so."

I'm not sure that's inherently a bad thing though. It quietly pushes towards a follow the standard (hopefully automated) system setup, but feel free to drift from that where it doesn't work for you.
The comments on this article border on shameful. Props to crocodoc for building this. The demo is really good, and there is a lot of impressive attention to detail: try pulling a page up while a page is already flipped.

Screw the misplaced hate and self-righteous UX criticisms. This is a tech demo. Much like chrome experiments. Appreciate it for what it is.
>I imagine there would be no perceptible difference when dealing in greyscale.

Not so: changing the color temperature changes how white looks.

It's night, so F.lux has lowered the temperature of my Mac, and if I hold my iPad up in front of my Mac's display white on the Mac look distinctly red-tinged compared to white on the iPad.
Doubly interesting to me -- when I realized that programming pays well because automation puts people out of jobs, or perhaps forces them to learn new skills, I started moving from hard libertarian to embracing certain pieces of socialism.

I don't buy into the coming stagnation bit though, once automating those services is the best bang/buck, it WILL be done.
The fact that this has been tried before (again and again) doesn't as much mean that it's doomed to fail, as that it's doomed to succeed at some point, so +karma for trying.

It would be awesome to find a way to make this work, and yes, it does sound like it's more of a marketing issue than anything technical.

I like the OAUTH solution. It's a bit facebook-ey to stick the name/face to the user, but it's fair.

Personally (and I do mean personally) I'd love to see it able to create "private" rooms for staging servers (web development) and admin-panels so I can instruct employees from halfway across the globe. I realize that's quite niche though, and not much of a market, but there it is.
A UX risk is that the prominent photos, as in your mockup, draw the eye and activate a visual mode of thought with specific concrete images. Appreciation of poetry also tries to trigger visual thoughts, but through words and imagination/ambiguity instead. So the concrete visuals might interfere with literary appreciation. (Consider also: often the most-appreciated text appears bare on a plain page.)

This is just a hunch, and you could perhaps test an imagery-heavy look against a spartan text-centric presentation, and see which draws more of the exact kinds of reading/engagement you want.

I read the domain first as "po"-"three", and thought of Edgar Allen Poe, but with a little thought can see it as "po"-"eh"-"three". As that, it is effectively short and memorable... I think it could work well.

Good luck!
In all likelihood all three will co-exist, but w3schools will continue to get most of the traffic.
Trades are pretty much anonymous, only the exchange itself knows who the participants are.
If you spend too much time planning you run the risk of never launching. I can sit here and refine my product forever, but at a certain point you just need to pull the trigger and launch the damned thing.
The author may be "a visionary technology executive with the drive to bring to market innovative and profitable solutions [and] an experienced team leader under start-up and growth conditions" but I confess I've rarely seen an article with less real content or newsworthiness. A quote from Ballmer raving about how Win 8 is going to change everything?
It isn't necessarily a worry, just a choice.
Leaked Apple iPad mini photos
I think "external memories" is a reasonable term for this. If you treat it as an analogue to the computer science definition of memory - a place to store information - then it's a pretty decent way of describing what's happening here.

I suppose the fact that the information is being stored at the location it describes, instead of in a central location, makes it a bit weird?
How does charging me somewhere vaguely in the ballpark of $36.50 per year qualify as "no impact"?

And I'm just an individual. What about when I send to an email list and it goes to 100 people? Should Google Groups pay a dollar to send out those 100 emails? What about MailChimp, do they have pay $200 when they send out a newsletter to 20,000 people?

I'm also concerned about how this money will be collected and how, from a technical perspective, all emails will be monitored. Every SMTP server will now have to be registered with the central oversight organization? VPNs and rogue email installations will be the enemy or blocked from communicating with anyone "on the grid"?
Legal Start-Up Toolkit - by Orrick
I had a recent need as well. Found Wookmark worked a little better for me than Masonry.
[1,9) is not equivalent to [1,8]. The center of [1,9) is infinitesimally close to the center of [1,9]. Its exactly equal when you take the limit.
I thought prostitution laws were avoided by escorting, providing time with another adult (which totally won't have sex involved!) for a fee? or is that to avoid different laws?
How Sweden is Solving Sex Slavery
Those are problems in the sense that software is a young industry, unlike other engineering disciplines (or "actual" engineering). We're likely to abstract away today's issues, whereas matter and physics are more direct, immediate limitations in engineering disciplines.

We don't have a "software physics".
The mechanism described in the article, that slime mold uses slime to mark an area as it is exploring it to avoid exploring it again on a later pass, eerily reminds me of graph traversal algorithms.
Facebook cranks up 'Pinteresting' revenue stream with Collections
I'd really like to see a 'Web 2012' standard, and 'Web 2013' standard, etc. It's basically the set of APIs which is implemented across all browsers at that date (say July 1st of that year).

So as an app developer, you could just design to 'Web 2011' which is the set of APIs fully supported (or polyfilled) across all browsers as of July 1st, 2011.
> There's the bloggers, the engineers, then the investors. None of it would work if there wasn't each part.

One of these things is not like the others.
> We will not celebrate. Every day will be awesome, or we stop what we’re doing and make it awesome. Cake is for gazelles, and we are lions.

What does this even mean?
Hm, I've already looked at OpenBox and quite liked it. Maybe I should take it for a longer spin.
>Concentrating trading in a few hands is the problem we had - too big to fail

No. You're confusing things. High frequency trading had nothing to do with financial bailouts. To my knowledge, no high frequency trading shop has ever been bailed out or deemed too big to fail.

>HFT will lead to barriers to new entrants (because of increasing startup costs).

Please explain this, how does HFT increase startup costs?

I'm not sure who you think benefits the most out of high frequency trading, but it's not huge banks like Goldman Sachs. My understanding is that the best high frequency shops are relatively small. They're made up of a mix of programmer and quants, not traditional investment bankers.
I have to parrot this suggestion.

Xfce is nicer than LXDE, and OpenBox on it's own is better than both once you pick the apps you want to go with it.
I have experienced support issues with PayPal as well. I once had a customer on a subscription that froze. It was a bug in their system and all I got from PayPal was "how are we sure they signed up for this subscription".

In the end they didn't help, I cancelled the subscription and had to ask the customer to signup again.
Yes, exactly. Disincentivizing innovation and the financial machine that backs it is an /excellent/ idea.
The argument you're making is in favor of my argument of regulating HFT (I want a limit to daily or weekly trade, others want more taxation).

As to regulation on healthcare/drones/cars etc. things aren't perfect, that's all I'm saying. I think things are too restrictive right now, I'm not arguing for abolition of all regulations.

edit: Yes, retail investors should be trading more. That's the idea behind the recent rise in crowdfunding. Innovation happens a lot faster in small c capitalism than in big C capitalism.
No, it's mostly for covering your own ass. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DesignByCommittee
yeah we've got a few ideas but at the moment we are just trying to figure out the best way to do it! thanks for the comment
Bad for Zynga!
If even half of that is true, then it does indeed taint my opinion of him, and fairly seriously.
Yes we were. I was actually surprised they did this from all the stories I had heard.
I'd like to see a fine issued for each mistaken DMCA takedown. Currently there's no incentive for IP owners not to carpet bomb the web with frequently-erroneous takedowns.
even if you can't buy it, the tagged image data is going to be pretty valuable... couple it with an image matching engine, and they can charge for API access.
That's because you have no idea how much non technical legwork has to go in place to build something. They had to develop personal relations with thousands of finicky galleries, then somehow convince them to try this new thing, digitizing their art. They had all sorts of fusses about the details of just about everything, every step of the way. See how Art.sy tries to prevent image scraping, for example. There's a lot more behind the scenes.
Good god - you need to write books - or make movies :D.

Wonderful explanation.
Does not work on iPad
Show HN: SoundOff.fm, a litmus test for new music
I would really like to see this happen. There are a lot of idealists who start companies, and most of them fail (most of all startups fail). But we do seem to be moving towards an era where good working conditions are simply more profitable than they used to be-I believe Valve and Github are perfect examples of this.
They are common for small businesses ($50K+ revenue per year into the millions) not so much micro businesses.

Trusts offer additional asset protection and tax benefits for business owners. Most accountants recommend this structure when setting up a business for you.

There are more articles out there with PayPal and trusts however since Micro businesses are most likely the heavy users of PayPal, they are generally setup as a sole trader or Pty ltd hence comply with PayPal's terms.
Sky Diver to Try to Become First to Break Sound Barrier
yes it is. I did look into it further once I received the email. My own fault for not reading the ToS throughly but I am not the only one who has been through it.
I saw the launch live and I saw the debris ejecting about 90 seconds in. What I found particularly amazing was that SpaceX either didn't know it, didn't want to confirm it or just realised that their design worked because all I heard after that was my favourite aerospace term "Situation nominal".
Here is the book and code bzip2ed: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/94483242/linux.tar.bz2
Sounds like a fun place to work.
Samsung announces Android 4.1 availability for Galaxy S III in South Korea
I stand corrected. Sort of since the DoD wasn't really a customer in those cases. And the reference listed doesn't specify that the first flight was paid for by the DoD.
I'm inclined to agree. This is the answer that Occam's Razor would give us. Especially given the fact that this aircraft was designed so long ago.

It would be one thing if we were reading leaked documentation about an experimental aircraft designed 10 years ago. But we're not. We're reading declassified info about an aircraft designed some 50-60 years ago. If it actually worked, a half-century would be a pretty reasonable timeframe from experiment to slightly more mainstream application. If not commercial application, than certainly military or scientific application. And its existence would have turned up by now. Alternatively, it would be so effective and groundbreaking that it would remain classified to this day, and nobody would have declassified any of this documentation.

EDIT: From the (extensively documented) Wikipedia article on the very similar Avrocar:

"In flight testing, the Avrocar proved to have unresolved thrust and stability problems that limited it to a degraded, low-performance flight envelope; subsequently, the project was cancelled in September 1961."
I'm not sure you can compare a pen with a programming language or framework. Changing pen has a very low opportunity cost.
Thanks rquantz. It wasn't meant to be a hate piece on PayPal or anything else other than just my thoughts on what had happened and events surrounding it. As I updated in my article it was there to let my customers know what had happened and that it isn't such a big deal for businesses to move on from PayPal.
Thanks for the excellent feedback. Planning to try a few layouts during the beta phase like you suggested.

Our assumption is that eventually most of our users will be using this via mobile apps (which is how we hope to make money).
Crowdfunding will be the core of the next tech bubble peaking ~2016-2018 - run on afterburner with the success of product pre-purchase launches (irrelevant to investment), the aggressive lobbying of VCs, the credulity/unsophistication of most investors and the passing of the JOBS act combined with the cycling of alpha searching global credit saturating the niche industry known as Silicon Valley.

But I'll gladly take part and take people's money while the times are good.

I don't particularly care either way - I make money no matter what the market.
I have had a growing hypothesis that my social intelligence with acquaintances and big groups (as opposed to close friends) is actually very bad. As is probably the case with most of us here, I didn't suspect this because my intelligence in all other arenas is excellent. I think I was further insulated from the problem because I was in small schools through high school, and never really felt socially deficient as a result.

In the 8 or so years since then, being thrust into more circumstances where I don't already know everyone, I have really started to notice it. In some ways, (if my hypothesis is true) realizing what the problem is has been a huge relief- I'm no longer mystified about why some people seem to have large social networks, and I have a small one. It's almost like someone finding out they were colorblind, and then realizing that maybe that was the reason they didn't really like some visual art that everyone else seemed to love.

But, I'm still unsure how to approach this problem. This article gives me some hope, but not too many specifics. My working relationships are all excellent, however. Its more just the "hanging out" with people my age, and finding social groups. I suck at that. Does someone with similar experiences want to chime in?
Not to mention rolling over something in luminate pops up a lightbox that obscures the image and has to be closed.
It sounds like this will all be fixed when js gets proper map types in ES6.